CFP: SSAWW Panels at ALA Boston 2015

The Society for the Study of American Women Writers will host two panels at the American Literature Association Conference (May 2015, Boston). The panel themes anticipate our November 4-8, 2015, conference in Philadelphia: “Liminal Spaces, Hybrid Lives.” The two ALA panels as well as our 2015 conference aim to present the varied ways in which women, as critics, dramatists, educators, essayists, journalists, oral storytellers, poets, novelists, short story writers, and practitioners of both older and emerging forms, invent and reinvent the American literary and cultural landscape. You may submit the same proposal to both conferences, if you wish.

Panel 1: Liminal Spaces in American Women’s Writing
This panel welcomes papers on American women writers in any genre and from any period that explores the concept of liminal spaces. The word “limen,” from which liminality derives, designates threshold. The threshold functions simultaneously as both an obstructive barrier and an enticing opening for the entry into unknown, perhaps unknowable states that invite exploration. Both spatial and temporal, the liminal is a site of in-betweenness enabling non-normative perspectives. It is a site where difference becomes encounter as well as a location that resists assimilation while simultaneously allowing for the dynamic possibilities of fusion that hybridity embraces and articulates. Papers might address such topics as borders and peripheries, liminal spaces in the home, the margin and/or the center, and immigration and/or citizenship.

Panel 2: Hybrid Lives in American Women’s Writings
This panel welcomes papers on American women writers in any genre and from any period that explores the concept of hybrid lives. Often informed by notions of crossing, intersectionality, transition, and transformation, this term contests exclusionary practices involving class, ethnicity, gender, race, religion, and sex, among other variables. Papers might address such topics as the hyphen, collaboration, cross-species encounters: human and animal relationships, transatlantic, transcontinental, and/or transgender.

Please submit to Kristin Allukian (kallukian@gatech.edu) by Jan. 3, 2015, a 250-500 word abstract (note which panel your proposal best fits) and a brief CV (no more than 2-pages) that includes rank/status (e.g. ABD or Associate Professor, etc.), institutional affiliation (independent scholars are welcome to submit proposals), publications, and conference presentations. Confirmation of receipt of your proposal will be sent to you within two business days.

All proposals should be both pasted into the text of the email and included as attachments (preferably as a single PDF document). While you do not need to be a SSAWW member to apply for the panel, presenters must be or become SSAWW members to participate in a SSAWW sponsored panel.